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The New Ride

I’ve been rid­ing the same bro­ken-down GT fix­ie that I bought on Craigslist in 2004. Nine years is a good life for a city bike. And it nev­er real­ly fit me any­way. With the slight­ly longer com­mute that came with my new job and house sit­u­a­tion, it was final­ly time to upgrade to a win­ter-capa­ble com­muter bike that could sup­port all my weird require­ments:

Lugs for racks and fend­ers (I want a front basket–more on this lat­er!)

A way to car­ry a choco­late malt on the go (Pos­si­bly not in the win­ter.)

At least one disc brake for stop­ping pow­er in dirty, wet con­di­tions

Main­te­nance-free belt dri­ve tech­nol­o­gy from the future!

Since I was look­ing for a most­ly off-the-shelf solu­tion, this list nar­rowed my options down to basi­cal­ly one bike, the Spot Wazee, which arrived Sat­ur­day. I got mine through Bel­mont Wheel­works, Spot’s unof­fi­cial non-deal­er in the Boston area.

Yeah, it’s great!

The frame is made in Tai­wan, but it still has some nice touch­es that are usu­al­ly found only on US-made bikes, like this brake bridge detail:

The rear hub is fair­ly heavy but it shifts like a dream. This is my first inter­nal­ly-geared hub and I’m impressed.

The Gates Car­bon Dri­ve is real­ly well made. At low speeds it is less effi­cient than a chain, but the dif­fer­ence is hard­ly notice­able. It’s qui­et and smooth. And clean to the touch!

4 Comments

It would be nice if you had an update post on how the Wazee has treat­ed you as a dai­ly ride. Is it as smooth a ride as you expect­ed? How has it treat­ed you in the win­ter weath­er? Has it been main­te­nance free?

I’m hap­py to say that I’ve been rid­ing it near­ly every day since I wrote this post and the bike has been per­form­ing admirably. Since tak­ing these pho­tos, I have added a set of Sykes wood fenders–and that’s about it. The bike eas­i­ly fits a set of stud­ded tires and han­dles the Boston win­ters with aplomb.

My only prob­lems so far have been a bro­ken spoke–not uncom­mon for machine-built wheels such as these–and a very creaky bot­tom brack­et that prob­a­bly needs to be replaced with a high­er-qual­i­ty part.

The bike is beau­ti­ful and reli­able and still attracts plen­ty of ques­tions from the bike-curi­ous.

JackMay 11, 2016

I dig the bike.
I’m look­ing at buy­ing this exact one…I’m curi­ous though, how fat can the tires get?
Any con­sid­er­a­tion is most appre­ci­at­ed.
Thanks!